“I’m not a lawyer,” he said.
Fassler, nudging his car restlessly against stalled traffic, said, “I’m totally mystified. Would you tell me, please, what the Organization was doing in the baby business?”
“I’m sorry,” Liebermann said, “but that’s not in our agreement.”
As if he knew.
He went back to Vienna. Where, in the face of a court order, the desks and file cabinets were being moved to an office Max had found, two small rooms in a run-down building in the Fifteenth District. And where he, therefore, had to move at once—Lili was already looking—to a smaller and cheaper apartment (good-by, Glanzer, you bastard). And where, what with one thing and another—two months’ advance on the office, legal fees, moving costs, the phone bill—there was hardly enough left in the kitty to buy a ticket to Salzburg, let alone Washington.
Which was where he had to go the week after next, February 4th or 5th.
He explained to Max and Esther while they made the new office look more like the War Crimes Information Center and less like H. Haupt & Son, Advertising Specialties. “The Guthries and the Currys,” he said, scraping the second H from the doorpane with a paper-pinched razor blade, “got their babies about four weeks apart, at the end of February and the end of March, 1961. And Guthrie and Curry were killed four weeks apart, one day over, in the same order. The Wheelocks got their baby around July fifth—this I know because they gave Frieda Maloney a ten-week-old puppy that was born on April twenty-sixth—”
“What?” Esther turned and looked at him. She held a map to the wall while Max pushed thumbtacks in.
“—and from the end of March to July fifth,” Liebermann said, scraping, “is roughly fourteen weeks. So it’s a good bet that Wheelock is supposed to be killed around February twenty-second, fourteen weeks after Curry. And I want to be in Washington two or three weeks before.”
Esther said, “I think I follow you,” and Max said, “What’s not to follow? They’re being killed in the same order they got the babies, and the same time apart. The question is—why?”
The question, Liebermann felt, would have to wait. Stopping the killings, whatever their reason, was what mattered, and his best chance of doing that was through the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. They could confirm easily enough that two men who had died in “accidents” were the fathers of illicitly adopted look-alike sons, and that Henry Wheelock was a third (or fourth, if they turned up the one in Macon-maybe). On February 22nd, give or take a few days, they could capture Wheelock’s intended killer, and learn from him the identities, and maybe even the schedules, of the other five. (Liebermann believed now that the six killers were working singly, not in pairs, because of the closeness in time of the murders of Döring, Guthrie, Horve, and Runsten—all in different countries.)
He might also, more easily, go to the Federal Criminal Investigation Department in Bonn, since he was certain that a German adoption agency (and an English and three Scandinavian ones) had had a Frieda Maloney searching its files and distributing babies. Klaus had found the boy in Freiburg identical to the one in Trittau, and Liebermann himself, while in Düsseldorf, had called the Frauen Döring, Rausenberger, and Schreiber, getting, in response to “Tell me, please, is your son adopted?,” two surprised and wary yesses, one furious no, and three orders to mind his own business.
But in Bonn he would have no next victim to offer, and the explanation of how he had got Frieda Maloney to talk wouldn’t be well received. He himself wouldn’t be well received either, as he hoped he might be in Washington. Besides, in his Jewish heart of hearts, he didn’t trust German authorities as much as American where Nazi matters were concerned.
So, Washington and the F.B.I.
He sat at the phone in the new office calling old contributors. “I don’t like to buttonhole you this way, but believe me, it’s important. Something that’s going on now, with six SS men and Mengele.” Inflation, they told him. Recession. Business was awful. He began bringing in dead parents, the Six Million—which he hated doing, using guilt as a fundraiser. He got a few promises. “Please, right away,” he said. “It’s important.”
“But it’s not possible,” Lili said, spooning a second deadly portion of potato kugel onto his plate. “How can there be so many boys who look alike?”
“Darling,” Max said to her across their table, “don’t say it’s not possible. Yakov saw. His friend from Heidelberg saw.”
“Frieda Maloney saw,” Liebermann said. “The babies were all alike, more than babies usually are.”
Lili made a spit-sound at the floor beside her. “She should die.”
“The name she used,” Liebermann said, “was Elizabeth Gregory. I meant to ask her if it was given to her or if she picked it herself, but I forgot.”
“What’s the difference?” Max asked, chewing.
Lili said, “Gregory. The name Mengele used in Argentina.”
“Oh, of course.”
“It must have come from him,” Liebermann said. “Everything must have come from him, the whole operation. He was signing it, even if he didn’t mean to.”
Some money came in—from Sweden and the States—and he booked a ticket to Washington via Frankfurt and New York, for Tuesday, February 4th.
On Friday evening, January 31st, Mengele was using the name Mengele. He had flown with his bodyguards to Florianópolis on the island of Santa Catarina, roughly midway between São Paulo and Pôrto Alegre, where in the ballroom of the Hotel Novo Hamburgo, decorated for the occasion with swastikas and red and black streamers, the Sons of National Socialism were holding a hundred-cruzeiros-ahead dinner dance. What excitement when Mengele made his appearance! Big Nazis, the ones who had played stellar roles in the Third Reich and were known throughout the world, tended to be snobbish toward the Sons, declining their invitations on grounds of ill health and making testy comments about their leader, Hans Stroop (who even the Sons would admit sometimes overdid his Hitler act). But here was Herr Doktor Mengele himself, in the flesh and white dinner jacket, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, beaming, laughing, repeating new names. How kind of him to come! And how healthy and happy he looked!
And was. And why not? It was the 31st, wasn’t it? Tomorrow he would paint four more checks on the chart and be more than halfway down the first column—eighteen. He was going to every dance and party available these days; a reaction, of course, to the anguish and depression he had gone through back in November and early December, when it had looked for a while as if Jew-bastard Liebermann was going to spoil everything. Sipping champagne in this festive ballroom full of admiring Aryans, some of the men in Nazi uniforms (squint a little: Berlin in the thirties), he was amazed to remember the state he’d been in scarcely two months back. Absolutely Dostoevskian! Plotting, planning, making arrangements to leap into the breach if the Organization betrayed him (which they had been on the verge of doing, there was no doubt of that). But then Liebermann had led Mundt off on a tour of France, and Schwimmer through the wrong cities in England; and finally, thank God, had given up and stayed home, assuming, no doubt, that his young American stooge had been mistaken. (Thank God, too, that they had got to him before he had actually played the tape for Liebermann.) So we sip champagne and eat these delicious little whatever-they-ares (“A pleasure to be here! Thank you!”) while poor Liebermann, according to The New York Times, is off in the wilds of America on what, reading between the lines of Jew-controlled puffery, is surely a very small-potatoes lecture tour. And it’s winter there! Snow, please, God; plenty of snow!